Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
by William Manchester
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Book Summary Information
Author: William ManchesterEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-04-12
ISBN: 0316501115
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
Book Review: a steadfast memoir
Summary: 5 Stars
Those of my generation who read World War II memoirs are so removed from that time and place that we merely grasp at this experience of war and the American society that fought it. In between us and our grandparents lies the redolence of the 1950s, the enduring narcissism 1960s, and the incubus of a cold war. But for those of us willing to learn, Goodbye Darkness is surely among the most competent of guides.
The book memorializes William Manchester's experience as young sergeant of Marines through the eyes of a middle-aged traveler visiting the locales of epic Pacific Theater battles. His description of the historical context of each battle rests upon a foundation of ample scholarly research. Manchester provides personal recollections where appropriate. (He spent time on Guadalcanal after the fighting ended there; his combat experience was on Okinawa.) And he then describes his visits to these island battlefields during a subsequent 1979 trip. He admits in the Author's Note that he "resorted to some legerdemain in the interest of re-creating, and clarifying the spirit of, the historical past." In any case, the writing is just what you've come to expect from Manchester: funny, sensitive, learned, deft, fine.
Goodbye, Darkness is the summation of Manchester's post-war cathexis, with the author enjoined a quarter century after the fact with the bloody fugue that hacked his manhood from a boy's life. As with his previous works, Manchester's voice is strong and clear, but here it's more personal. He is wrestling with ghosts, specifically his own disaffected, alienated doppelganger from a quarter century ago; the savage young sergeant of Marines who visits his middle-aged persona in the ragged, misbegotten battlefields of post-war dreams.
I admired the restraint of this book. Manchester loads the tumbrel of war horrors lightly. He economizes on the brutality and asks nothing for its personal cost. Despite the brutality of the landings on Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and others described in the book, Manchester balances the strategic, the tactical, and the personal. He observes that "the whole history of war is a story of men moving closer and closer to the ground and then deeper and deeper in it." That's very much the story of the Marine Corps experience on the beaches of the Pacific islands and it's fighting ground that Manchester is burrowing into here, not the angst of his generation.
One of the characteristics I most appreciated was a resolute refusal to whinge, self-indulge, or to ponder the bellybutton of his generation. Indeed, some of the best writing in the book considers the unique qualities of his generation and their capacity to fight this kind of gruesome war. Manchester has no interest in the sympathy of his readers, either for himself or his generation. It's not sympathy, but respect is that I find his generation deserves, but I find my respect is rooted in Manchester's refusal to demand it.
His description of the atmosphere at the front is powerful without resorting to melodrama. Quoting the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Manchester describes his comrades with their "sad infinite eyes, like those of a newborn beast of burden." In describing why they did what they did, often risking their lives, often dying in desperate fighting, he says of his comrades "we were all psychotic, inmates of the greatest madhouse in history, but staying on the line was a matter of pride. Pride was important to young men then." (Written in the twilight of the Vietnam War, all the book's references to Vietnam are oblique.)
Manchester's father had fought in World War I. He brought home a grave wound and a quiet dignity. That dignity reverberated through Manchester's youth, creating in his mind and spirit an appetite for glory and honor. The Pacific War reduced that appetite, grinding away the shibboleths of war. In war "I realized that something within me, long ailing, had expired," he writes. "Although I would continue to do the job, performing as the hired gun, I now knew that the banners and swords, ruffles and flourishes, bugles and drums, the whole rigmarole, eventually ended in squalor."
What made them the Greatest Generation? What ignited them and drove them to return, wounded, to the line from safe hospitals to fight alongside their comrades in desperate battles, as Manchester himself did during the war? As he writes, "It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I knew now, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another." A great insight and a great book.
Summary of Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
The nightmares began for William Manchester 23 years after WW II. In his dreams he lived with the recurring image of a battle-weary youth (himself), "angrily demanding to know what had happened to the three decades since he had laid down his arms." To find out, Manchester visited those places in the Pacific where as a young Marine he fought the Japanese, and in this book examines his experiences in the line with his fellow soldiers (his "brothers"). He gives us an honest and unabashedly emotional account of his part in the war in the Pacific. "The most moving memoir of combat on WW II that I have ever read. A testimony to the fortitude of man...a gripping, haunting, book." --William L. ShirerMilitary Books
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